Wednesday, March 17, 2010

It is inherent to all F2P games that the cash shop must be used. It is thus inherent to all F2P games that the developers must be constantly thinking of ways to get players to use the shop. The result is a conflict of interest between developing a quality product and developing a product that makes money. I submit that the two can not ever exist in harmony.

This gives me a little bit of hope that some gamers are waking up to the insanity of the model. My view on the whole thing is well documented at this point, so I won't rehash it other than to post links:

Not sure where I stand on free-to-play games. Problem is that no one's yet made a good one.

I'm a bit agog at his statement that free-to-play's demise is the strain between quality and profit, as though that duality is unique to the model. I think it's endemic to the games industry, music industry, film industry, book industry ...

There's nothing particularly sacrosanct about the subscription model. It's hardly produced a string of breathtaking products either. Keen's problem, from my limited vantage, is his tendency to swing from pole-to-pole. Allods is great or all free-to-play is devilish. I don't begrudge him his flexibility of mind and willingness to reconsider matters. You'd just think he'd learn to hedge and equivocate more.

@MigKeen gets excited, but I'll never fault him for backing away from a game he discovers he doesn't want to play. Unlike with some past games he actually saw the problems with Allods before it even released, and even in his excitement he made sure to remind everyone "this could turn really bad, really fast".

Anyone who reads Keen for more than 5 minutes knows he pulls a 180 like this. Every. Single. Time. I like reading Graev but Keen is just ridiculous by now.

Doesn't matter if it's an individual game (usually is) or this time it's all of F2P. I notice that he never did actually say what his tipping point was, not that he ever seems to need one.

The only place where I take Keen "seriously" is that everything he posts will be The Next New Awesome, I typically avoid because it most likely will be a heap of trash and he will do his Jekyll & Hyde routine within 30 days or less anyway, therefore I always *seriously* hope he doesn't bother getting excited about games I'm actually interested in, such as Guild Wars 2.